World in Flames wi-3

by Ian Slater

  “Yes, sir, they’ve definitely had it,” said Emerson triumphantly. “I’ve got distance as well as speed, sir. It’s no feint this time.”

  He seemed to be right, the groaning of the Alfa’s hull testimony to the brutal fact that, double titanium hull or not, every sub had its crush depth, and the Alfa was now well below hers — over six thousand feet below, the sound of crunching steel that would soon be squashed flat rising up from the deep like the death throes of some great leviathan dying the most horrible death a sailor could imagine.

  “Go to screen,” ordered Brentwood. “Take it off amplify.”

  “Yes, sir.” As Emerson reached for the knob, there was a last sound, a high-pitched scream, that, though obviously from some of the electronic equipment rather than the bone-crushing sound of metal being crushed, sounded eerily human, like a newborn, and for a moment Brentwood thought of Rosemary and the child she was carrying.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “Korea!” pronounced Lewis, upon looking down from the Hercules ramp at the moonlit snow blanketing the Scottish highlands that were flitting like white islands through churning cumulus over twenty-five thousand feet below. “I knew it. They’re sending us to bloody Korea.”

  The red warning light came on and the SAS troopers stood up, lumbering slowly forward, weighed down by HALO packs, oxygen masks, infrared-goggled helmets, and the SAS weapon of choice — the U.S. Ingram MAC-11—Military Armament Corps — submachine gun, Lewis making it clear to anyone who could hear him above the Hercules’ sustained roar that he certainly hoped this would be the last “bloody night HALO” they’d have to practice.

  “It is,” responded Cheek-Dawson, his face all but invisible in the green/black camouflage paste and helmet sprouting bracken as he checked that each man had spat in the infrared goggles to help prevent condensation and that they had all checked their wrist altimeters — in sync with that of the Hercules.

  “Remember the drill,” the sar’major told them, his voice tinny through the hailer. “When you land, unhitch but never mind the chute. Won’t have time to drag in, fold, or bury it this time. You must expect patrols both inside and outside the drop zone.” Lowering the megaphone, the sergeant major looked about. “Aussie!”

  “Sar’Major?”

  “If a flare goes up?”

  “Take off the IF glasses.”

  “Correct. Now, we have fifteen minutes to take out a divisional HQ. Target, this man.” He took a blowup of an Asian-looking officer and held it high, with Cheek-Dawson shining his flashlight on it. “Brigadier general,” said Cheek-Dawson. “Insignia — epaulets and shoulder tabs, yes. But the face, gentlemen. Go for the face. Remember it.” He then passed it around.

  “I dunno,” said Lewis. “They all look the same to me. What do you reckon, Fritz?”

  The German looked at the photo.

  “No, Aussie. I think the nose is very definite. You see — and the jaw is—”

  “Stone the bloody crows, Fritz,” said Lewis, winking at Thelman and Brentwood. “Just a joke. Strike a light — you Krauts take everything so seriously?” Lewis turned his head to Cheek-Dawson. “What’s after this, sir?”

  “Through the house once more for final selection to the squadron.” It wasn’t so much a house but a canvas mockup of an enemy’s divisional HQ near Hereford, complete with booby traps.

  “Whole squadron going, sir?”

  “Can tell you that much, yes. All eighty of us — providing we get asked. Apart from that, as you know, our job is to keep fit, on standby.”

  “You have any ideas, sir?” pressed Lewis.

  “Sorry, Lewis, I can’t be of any assistance to your book-making prognostications, but you know the drill. SAS security’s so tight — has to be — that we’d only be told forty-eight hours in advance in any case. That’s why we have you cover the field. You’re supposed to be ready for anything. Right, Sar’Major?”

  “Right, sir.”

  “You will lose a lot of money if it is Korea, eh, Aussie?” teased Schwarzenegger.

  “Aw — shuddup, you Kraut!”

  * * *

  Four of the eighty men were killed during the jump, one in a tumble, one whose emergency chute failed, and two who overshot the zone, going down in one of the lochs, drowned before they could get out of the harness with the 110-pound battle packs weighing them down in the frigid water. Cheek-Dawson took it harder than anyone but was determined not to let it show. They had lost a dozen men in accidents, either going over the Brecons or on the Hereford forced marches and in the jumps. But it had to be done if you were to be the best. Nevertheless, he was growing as impatient as the rest of them for a mission, though here again, he couldn’t let on. And so it was with a sense of both exhilaration and measured apprehension that, upon returning to the base, he received the news from Major Rye that Operation Merlin was on.

  “Run-through time?” asked Cheek-Dawson.

  “Twenty hours,” said Rye. “Enough?”

  “If we have all the maps, paraphernalia, et cetera,” said Cheek-Dawson.

  “We do.”

  “Good show. First briefing early morning?” asked Cheek-Dawson, though it was already near 10:00 p.m., well after lights-out.

  “Yes,” said Rye.

  “Very good, sir. Good night.”

  “Good night,” said Rye, but first he would have to write letters immediately to the families of the four men who had died that night. Contrary to what was generally thought, Rye did not find the task particularly onerous. It was one of the few times when he could talk quite unsentimentally about brave men. Besides, because he was constrained by SAS security requirements, he could give no hint of where they had been or where they would have been going, and this allowed parents and loved ones to gain some solace by thinking the men had already partaken in a highly secret operation and had therefore been killed on “active service”—which was technically correct.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  Rosemary Spence woke up from a fitful sleep of storms and monstrous waves and of men cast upon an angry ocean that was at once majestic and terrifying in its power. But Robert was nowhere among the men she saw passing her in the dream, but could be seen on a distant pebbled shore, the shore pounded so incessantly that the moment she woke and found Georgina by her side, she still felt bound to the far-off island, the pebbles — as in Dover Beach, which she’d been discussing with the sixth form the day before — still roiling in dreadful unison as they were sucked out and flung back by the surf — every pebble in the dream a lost soul, as insignificant to the sea as a grain of sand.

  “You all right?” asked Georgina, holding her sister’s hand.

  “I—” Rosemary began, and fell back exhausted onto her pillow. “I’m sorry. Was I making a racket?”

  “Not really,” said Georgina, “but I could hear you from my room. Sounded like a nightmare.” She paused. “Robert?”

  “Yes,” answered Rosemary, still finding it difficult to tear herself away from the dark yet transparent symbolism of the dream. “Isn’t the first, I’m afraid. I worry about him all the time these days.” She looked up at Georgina. In the quiet of the room, it was as if the two were meeting in a place where they had never been before, but now, each confronted by her own fears — Rosemary for Robert and Georgina for Peter Zeldman — it was a place they both knew the other understood. Until this moment, they had carried their own fears stoically, and in silence, but in the sharing of them now, there was a mutual understanding and compassion that neither had felt for the other since their childhood.

  “You dream of Peter very much?” Rosemary asked.

  “All the time. But it’s all so terribly vague in my case. I think it might help if I could remember the details after, but I can’t. I try. Sometimes I don’t even realize I’ve had a dream about him until later in the day. Then something — I don’t know— something quite unrelated, it seems, will remind me of it.”

  “Do you think of him being on the submarine?”<
br />
  “No — at least I don’t think so. But it’s always a very confined space. I do know that. Like a cave, the entrance closing.”

  Rosemary shivered. “It’s always the same island for me. And ice as far as I can see, and the closer I get, the further it recedes, the more I hear the surf crashing on a beach — a cruel, hard beach of stones.” Quite unknown to herself, Rosemary’s hands were moving protectively over her stomach as she was talking.

  Georgina squeezed her hand. “I won’t be foolish and tell you you shouldn’t worry about the baby. I guess every mother does. But try not to fret too much, Rose.”

  Rosemary didn’t answer. It was the first time Georgina had called her “Rose” in years.

  “Oh Lord,” said Rosemary, “how can they do that — go down there for weeks at—”

  “Months,” said Georgina.

  “Oh, thank you,” said Rosemary in mock reproach. “You’re a great help.” It eased the tension and they began to laugh, and soon the laughter had turned to tears and they were embracing.

  “What a pair of ninnies,” snuffled Rosemary. “Really— they’re probably telling obscene jokes and drinking cocoa.”

  “Coffee!” corrected Georgina, wiping her eyes.

  From the hallway, Richard Spence saw them, thought of going in, but instead withdrew, walking softly back to bed.

  “Richard — what’s the matter?” asked Anne, her voice dopey with the sleeping pills she had found necessary since young William’s death.

  “Nothing,” he said, and switched off the light, but he lay awake; the sight of his two daughters so close together filled him with a warmth he hadn’t experienced in years. Yet he felt it shot through with his own fears about his son-in-law and his doubts about the advisability of Georgina marrying young Zeldman. Anne continued to be all for it, but the war situation was so grave, and getting worse each day, that Richard wanted to spare Georgina whatever angst he could. Most people, he believed, including Anne, simply didn’t realize how bad it really was in Europe. Unable to be supplied with as much as they needed because of the Soviet sub offensive was bad enough for the NATO forces, but now it was widely reported that more and more Soviet subs, like those which continued to attack American West Coast shipping, were still getting through the SOSUS network.

  As he drifted off to sleep, Richard Spence said a prayer for “the two boys” and for all those other men who went willingly, and not so willingly, down to the sea in ships, and he sought comfort in the words of the ancient Anglican prayer for “those who go down to the sea in ships: We give thee humble thanks for that thou hast been pleased to preserve through the perils of the deep…”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Sonarman Emerson was not the first aboard Roosevelt to detect the deadly danger they were in. This unhappy distinction fell upon Seaman Leach, the steward and cook’s helper.

  The cook had been trying to cheer up the crew by telling a story about how he used to play his “date line trick”— confusing new shipmates by serving a breakfast twice a day whenever the sub crossed the date line.

  But the story fell flat after Roosevelt, her starboard ballast tanks ripped open as she lay bottomed and still taking in water, sat stranded, unable to rise. Leach grunted. No one had said a word of reproach to him about the exploding coffeepot that had started the chain of events that now left the Sea Wolf trapped, its escape hatches inoperable and several hydraulic lines severed, the diving plane fixed in an “up angle” but the sub unable to rise the three hundred feet to surface, a ruptured ballast tank completely flooded. Leach couldn’t bring himself to look straight at any of the men as he doled out scalloped potatoes and green peas and steak, limiting his line of sight out of shame to their name tags and dosimeters on their belts. It was because of this hangdog expression, unable to look any of his shipmates in the face, that he was the first to notice the danger.

  Everybody else had been too preoccupied with their individual jobs, and besides, no one had noticed because they were working in the much dimmer light of the sub’s emergency battle lanterns until the blown circuits could be fixed. The men in most trouble, he noticed, were those from the engine room, which, along with Control, had experienced the worst flooding.

  By the time he’d finished serving, Leach felt ill, and breaking out into a sweat, despite the chilly fifty-five degrees of the sub, he went to crew’s quarters, slid into the six-by-three-by-two-foot slot that was his bunk, and pulled the two-foot-high curtains shut.

  The man below him thought he heard a whimpering sound, and when he asked Leach whether he was all right, Leach said he was fine, but his voice was strained. Now and then he could hear the hesitant but persistent tapping throughout the ship as the various department chiefs supervised timber reinforcements against the leaks, tightening C-clamps on the joints and trying to reinforce the big flange joint in the engine room. There were already over nine hundred gallons that had poured in in just over a minute. The sound of the tapping, monitored by Emerson, wasn’t too loud and wasn’t standing out from the ice clutter. In any case, some of the men argued there was no point in worrying about making sound as they had no choice but to try to mend the damage and extrude the water as quickly as the damaged pumps would allow. Either that or let the sub fill slowly and drown like rats. But soon Leach couldn’t stand the noise any longer.

  The blue curtain across his bunk space swished back and he dropped down in his underwear, teary-eyed, looking at the other six men in his section. A chief petty officer, passing through, immediately sensed something was wrong, the tension fairly crackling in the air. “What’s going on?”

  Leach was zipping up his fly. “Permission to see the captain!” It wasn’t so much a question as a demand. Before the chief could say anything, Leach bellowed, “Please!” in a tone at once so pleading and threatening that the CPO knew the man was literally on the edge.

  “Sure — Leach, isn’t it? Sure, I’ll take you up.”

  * * *

  “Wait here,” the chief told Leach, who had seemed to calm down a little on the way to Control. The chief pulled back the curtained door of Control. Inside the redded-out room, Robert Brentwood was surrounded by ship’s charts, the chief engineer, and several other technical officers. The chief knew it was the wrong time to interrupt — Brentwood’s face lined with the strain — but the chief’s expression spoke volumes, clearly conveying the message to the captain that they had a possible Section Eight on their hands. Besides which Brentwood had made a point of being “accessible” to his men’s concerns. Brentwood saw Leach wild-eyed, nodded at the chief, and invited Leach aft of Control. Closer now to Leach, Brentwood could see what he took to be the classic signs of claustrophobic panic. It was unusual but not unknown among submariners; sometimes even the toughest among them caught “coffin fever” after extreme stress.

  “What can I do for you, Leach?” Brentwood asked, trying to strike the right attitude between concern and the obvious need for expediency.

  “Sir, I dropped the—” He stopped, looking down, his chest heaving.

  Robert Brentwood thought of his earlier days in the navy, of how it was for all young men, of how it might be for his son — if they won this war — to have to face a moment of devastating truth. “Listen, sailor, any one of us could have dropped a clanger. It was an accident. A serious one. You know that. Everyone aboard does. Can’t be undone. You look at it straight in the face, resolve to do better, and go on. But you don’t roll over and die. That’s no good to us — it’s no good to you.”

  There was silence, apart from the cautious tapping throughout the sub and the oppressive smell of diesel oil, which Brentwood hated with a passion and which was seeping out from some of the severed hydraulic hoses. “Listen, son. First time I was in Bledsoe — in the tank — we had a flange ring separate. Out shot a wall of solid water. Never seen anything like it. Every time I tried to get near it, it just kept pushing me back. Couldn’t see a darn thing.”

  Leach was still lookin
g down at his feet.

  “But I finally made it. Know what happened?”

  Leach’s chest seemed to collapse, then suddenly heave again. Robert put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “CPO was yelling at me to stop picking my nose and get in there — the whole ship depended on me. So I had to grit my teeth, charge in, and get the monkey wrench on. Turned the damn thing counterclockwise — opened her up further. I tell you that water was roarin’ in like Niagara, but I could hear the chief above it all right. Face redder man a fat admiral. Purple! Said I was a ‘disaster’—said a few other things, too, which I won’t repeat.” Robert grinned. “I thought my life was over — career down the tube. But I got through it. We’ll get through this one, Leach. No one bought it, did they?”

  “How we gonna get up?” asked Leach.

  “I’m working on it,” said Brentwood. “Now, if you’ll let me get back to the blueprints and—”

  “We’re all going to die.”

  Robert nodded. “That’s a possibility, Leach. But right now let’s stow that where it belongs. You and I have to get to work and—”

  “Radiation,” said Leach.

  Brentwood shook his head. “Listen, Leach, if that’s what’s bothering you, you can relax. Reactor room officer and his boys have been over the coffee grinder with a fine-tooth comb. Not even a hairline fracture. Even if there was, we’ve got the outer shield. They build them tough in Groton, Leach. So that’s one thing you can’t blame your—”

  “Their reactor, sir,” said Leach. He was now looking up directly at Brentwood. “I’ve been watching the men’s dosimeters as they’ve come through the chow line. Color change’s hard to pick up under the different lighting in the sub.”

  Brentwood felt his stomach tightening. Instinctively he bent his neck to look down at his own belt dosimeter. There was only a slight change — if any — that he could notice.